PoPChess

The New York Review of Books piece by Garry Kasparov is turning out to be quite popular. It was picked up by the Huffington Post, the Guardian, and now it’s been cited in The Atlantic and the NY Times “Ideas” blog. I believe the NY Times Syndicate will also be offering it to subscribers abroad. At first it wasn’t something we thought we had time for, but the more we talked about ideas for it, and how it worked in with some of the recent themes of Garry’s business speeches, the more he wanted to do it. Now we’re all glad it’s out there. The main theme I’m referring to is that of “commercialism and incrementalism is replacing innovation and risk,” to simplify it far too much.

With the supremacy of the chess machines now apparent and the contest of “Man vs. Machine” a thing of the past, perhaps it is time to return to the goals that made computer chess so attractive to many of the finest minds of the twentieth century. Playing better chess was a problem they wanted to solve, yes, and it has been solved. But there were other goals as well: to develop a program that played chess by thinking like a human, perhaps even by learning the game as a human does. Surely this would be a far more fruitful avenue of investigation than creating, as we are doing, ever-faster algorithms to run on ever-faster hardware.

This is our last chess metaphor, then–a metaphor for how we have discarded innovation and creativity in exchange for a steady supply of marketable products. The dreams of creating an artificial intelligence that would engage in an ancient game symbolic of human thought have been abandoned. Instead, every year we have new chess programs, and new versions of old ones, that are all based on the same basic programming concepts for picking a move by searching through millions of possibilities that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s.

Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time and money experimenting with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? Such thinking should horrify anyone worthy of the name of scientist, but it seems, tragically, to be the norm. Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors.

The ending paragraphs of the article aren’t really an endorsement to drop chess for poker, of course. But the investigation into teaching computers to play better poker seems likely to be more beneficial on a scientific level both for understanding human thought and computer intelligence than chess computing turned out to be in the end. I’m not overlooking the progress made in various areas, from parallel processing to the clever playing algorithms themselves, but even enthusiasts admit we didn’t get what we came for, so to speak.

And yes, the programs have gotten smarter, not just faster, although it’s the incredibly fast hardware available today that allows the “slow” programs to be effective. That is, it used to be that adding significant knowledge slowed the algorithm to a crawl, more than negating the beneficial playing strength effects of the knowledge. This trade-off is still very much in effect, but the faster the machines, the more knowledge you can work in and the better the program will be relative to the dumber programs, since the law of diminishing returns and the branching factor are so extreme. To again oversimplify, a smart program at 6 ply will get killed by a dumber one reaching 10, but a smart one at 14 will beat a dumber one at 18.

Those unfamiliar with the legendary NYRB might be surprised that the book in question, Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind by Diego Rasskin-Gutman, isn’t mentioned much in the article. The Review doesn’t really review books (four stars!) as much as it attempts to present good writing and interesting ideas on the topic in general. It was nice working on something other than politics and business!

The Review has asked Garry to do a podcast interview following up on the article; we’ll see if he has time this week.